More commonly known as NAS, it’s when you attach hard drives to something that can make it known to your network. Most routers these days can do this if you plug in a USB drive. NAS servers generally are hard drive containers with a small operating system and a dash of extra functionality on top. Ours, for example, can do automated drive health checks, send us emails, or host a website. These are all things you can normally do, but it’d require a bunch of work on your side. Now, we can just let the “on-board” computer handle everything after checking some checkboxes.

It’s really quite convenient, and the timing is great. I was starting to run out on space on my laptop’s internal drive, and my external one has been to full to support backups for over a year now. That’s a looong time to go without a complete copy of your system, it honestly gets me a bit anxious sometimes.

As of today though I’ve got a grand total of three terabytes at my disposal. One from the shared family drive, and two from a drive I purchased for myself. That’s a lot of space all of a sudden! I’ll probably reserve the single terabyte for backups (including multiple previous versions of files), and then use the remaining two for storage of movies, music, what have you. Also a good place for backups of my phone and other devices.

Kinda neat how many features the server comes packed with, but also somewhat overwhelming.
~ Fang